SPIKE LEE'S GOTTA HAVE IT

By Stuart Mieher; Stuart Mieher is a staff writer for Georgia Trend, a business magazine in Atlanta.

Published: August 9, 1987

THE SCENE IS AN OLD FAIR-GROUNDS building in Atlanta, now Madame Re-Re's Beauty Salon, a surreal creation of plywood, plaster and paint. The set has been packed with a score of dancers, a film crew and the director Spike Lee, all of them sweating under 140,000 watts of lighting to piece together a production number. Now the crew is taking a break. The dancers, overheated, head for cooler air outside.

Lee wanders out too, a short, spindly figure in black trousers, black sneakers and a Mets baseball cap. He is looking for an audience, and he finds one, a visitor. He asks, ''Did you hear we got kicked off campus?'' The campus in question is that of Morehouse College, Lee's alma mater and the main location for his second feature film, about student life at an all-black college. Things are not working out as planned. Lee tells of how the school's president, Hugh Morris Gloster, ''thought this would be a negative portrayal of black colleges.'' The director pauses at a snack table to stuff a few orange slices into his mouth, then adopts a mocking, presidential tone: ''He said, 'We have information that actors in the movie use an obscene word, and parents wouldn't want to send their children here if they heard that.' Sure, we're using the word. And so are the parents of those kids.'' (Gloster, the Morehouse president, says: ''They came in shooting on the campus and we began to get reports about things that were going on,'' such as some football cheers with decidedly off-color references. Parents, he feared, ''would judge the school on what they see in this film.'') Lee devours a few more slices of orange, then continues: ''We were going to do a premiere in Atlanta. Now we'll do it in New York. We need a warm reception, and there are too many people, powerful people in Atlanta who wish we'd never come here.''

This is Spike Lee, talking wise, disrespectful of authority, a bit paranoid, hungry. As a first-year graduate-school film student, he had the audacity to parody the cinematic classic ''The Birth of a Nation.'' As director, writer, star and producer of his first feature-length film, he became a phenomenon. ''She's Gotta Have It'' was the tale of a young black woman who felt no need to choose among her three lovers. She was, says Lee, ''living her life like a man.'' Lee played Mars Blackmon, a rapping street kid who joked his way into her bed and stole scene after scene. The film, made in 1985 for less than $175,000, pulled in $7 million at the box office. For an independent, shoestring production, this was remarkable. For an independent shoestring production by a black man about black people, it was astounding.

Since then, Lee has emerged as a nexus of black culture. Stevie Wonder wrote a song for his new film. Jesse Jackson delivered a prayer on the set for the project's success. In Atlanta, clean-cut Morehouse students beseeched Lee for autographs, seeing in him a new role model. One, grasping a copy of Black Enterprise magazine that featured an article about Lee, asked, ''Should brothers and sisters go to an entrepreneurial mode and struggle it out, or go to white corporations?'' Lee's advice: ''It's always better to have your own thing going.''

Still only 30 years old, Lee has gained a degree of respect and freedom accorded few independent film makers at any age. ''I consider him, forget black and white, one of the most original young film makers in the world,'' says David Picker, president of Columbia Pictures. Lee's current project, which Columbia plans to distribute next February, is a musical with the punnish title ''School Daze.'' Its budget of about $6 million is small by Hollywood's standards, but three dozen times larger than Lee has had before.

With an audience or an interviewer, Lee is animated, opinionated, gloriously quotable. He rails against black celebrities who ''have a vicious crossover mentality.'' According to Lee, ''They want to get on the cover of Rolling Stone. That's when you start seeing the symptoms - the nose jobs, the cleft chins, the blue and green contact lenses.''

He takes the film establishment to task for producing shallow, misleading portrayals of black society. ''I'm tired of people who know nothing about us defining our lives,'' he says. He trumpets a grand ambition: to present a new view of black life to the mass audience.

But on the set of ''School Daze,'' a different Spike Lee emerges, one with little of his shoot-from-the-lip arrogance. He is a thoughtful, organized and silent presence, focused on the task at hand, giving an occasional direction but welcoming no interruption. One friend calls him ''a pot at continuous simmer,'' and the description seems apt.

THE DIRECTOR, ALL 125 POUNDS of him, is sitting in a college auditorium, a black pork-pie hat perched on his head. His sweatshirt this evening says on the front ''Mission,'' the name of the fictitious black coed school where the film takes place. On the back, a motto: ''Uplift the Race.'' Lee's high-top basketball shoes are secured with orange Day-Glo laces.